Zombies, Bath Salts in Diaries

Zombies aren’t just an American phenomenon. Two young ladies, Alisse Lee Goldenberg and An Tran, have put together what they call “An epic Canadian zombie novel told entirely through diary entries.” That is their new book Bath Salts: A Zombie Novel.

And these two seem obsessed with Zombies, take a look at their facebook page and you see photos of World War Z author Max Brooks, Norman Reedus from The Walking Dead, zombie tattoos and links to George A Romero’s Night Of The Living Dead Live.

This is how An pitches the book to prospective readers:

Do you remember the drug, Bath Salts? That incident where the one guy ate the other guy’s face?

It was all a government conspiracy. The government made up the drug to cover up zombie outbreask. Two women realize what’s happening and flee to Nunavut to ride out the outbreak. But what starts happening, and what they don’t realize, is that they’re moving apart in two very different paths. One girl believes that to survive the zombie outbreak means you’re still human, but you have all your morals and ethics intact because that’s what makes you human. The other believes that surviving a zombie outbreak means you’re still a human… By any means necessary. Nothing is sacred.

Read more

Zombie Baby is a Potential

“There are plenty of movies about killing zombies, but I’ve never seen one about taking care of a zombie.” Just like that, Andy Jones is on his way to Hollywood with his Zombie Baby.

Making it in Tinsel Town as a screenwriter is difficult. Books have been written on the subject touting the same formulas. Dozens attend lectures hoping to get a glimpse of the secret to success. People pay thousands of dollars for higher education degrees to learn the craft, but the truth of the matter is that it takes luck, talent, and non-stop hard work. Andy Jones, it seems, has found all of that with his new screenplay, the recently Black Listed Zombie Baby.

Read more

Can Pets be Zombified, Too?

I’ve got to tell you, I am a little concerned.  Not only is there zombie preparedness kits and posters to download online but commercials are featuring zombies. They are all over the place, even in the “news.” Everyone is talking or writing about them may be all kidding but it got me thinking.  Should we be taking this more seriously AND what would happen to our pets?  Would they be zombified, too? Kidding or not.

After thinking about it for hours today, I think, if they were not protected, they would.  I think, all living things not destroyed or eaten, would morph into a “zombie” IF it were able to be infected with “zombie juice” or whatever it was that was causing the transformation.

“Zombie,” however, I think is just being used as a catch-all word.  I think it would encompass all human beings–or living things–during an large incidence for instance, that got very sick, couldn’t be treated and were still moving/infecting others.  I don’t think, necessarily, that it means the “zombie” image of the big screen. At least I sure hope not.

Read more

War Can Lead to More Zombies

Zombie stories aren't going away, and our research suggests that more are coming. This chart shows the number of zombie movies that came out in the West each year since 1910. There are definite spikes during certain periods, which always seem to happen eerily close to historical events involving war or social upheaval.

Five years ago, we noticed that zombie movies seemed correlated with war. Everything from 28 Days Later to World War Z makes explicit reference to wartime. But is there really a connection between the popularity of zombie movies and social unrest? We decided to do some research and find out.

The result was the graph above (click here for a larger size), which does suggest that for some reason people crave zombie movies during times of war. And that means we may be in for a new round of zombie tales in coming years.

Read more

'The Walking Dead' Zombies Get Turned into Online Course

Massive open online courses (MOOCs) have gotten mixed reviews from academia, but maybe they’ll have an easier time winning over studios and fans of the undead.

Ahead of the new season of its hit TV show The Walking Dead, cable network AMC has partnered with education technology company Instructure and the University of California at Irvine for an online course based on the popular television series.

The eight-week course, titled “Society, Science, Survival: Lessons from AMC’s ‘The Walking Dead,’” will include content, video clips and examples from the show, as well as possible participation from the actors.

Read more

Space and Zombies

Zombies. They're your ultimate nightmare. But the only thing that's more intense than regular zombies? Is space zombies. Because zombies are automatically way more terrifying when there's noplace to run. Here are the 10 greatest space zombies of all time!

 

Possible spoilers ahead...

We hadn't realized quite how many space zombies there are out there — especially if you throw in some edge cases like the Reavers. Zombies have been ruling the spaceways for decades, since Plan 9 From Outer Space and Astro Zombies (which is technically about a human space engineer who uses astronaut tech to turn Earthlings into zombies.)

Read more

'The World's End' Creators Talk About Cops, Beers and Zombies

Back in 2004, Shaun of the Dead became a cult hit. That alone was a victory for its creators—director Edgar Wright, actor and Wright’s writing partner Simon Pegg, and actor Nick Frost, who collaborated on the British TV series Spaced—but the fact that it set them on the road to creating one of the great genre trilogies is a miracle. Their follow-up, 2007′s buddy-cop send-up Hot Fuzz, cemented their reputation for whip-smart scripts that both satirized and embraced the sci-fi and pulp tropes they’d grown up with. (Hell, Pegg’s 2011 memoir, Nerd Do Well, includes enough Star Wars meditations to choke a Hutt.)

Since then, Edgar Wright directed Scott Pilgrim vs. the World and has been developing Ant-Man for Marvel. Pegg nabbed plum roles in the Mission: Impossible and Star Trek franchises, and Frost has popped up everywhere from Attack the Block to Snow White and the Huntsman. Now, at last, the band is getting back together. Its Three Flavors Cornetto trilogy concludes with August’s The World’s End. The movie follows a group of friends who try to re-create an epic pub crawl from their youth but become humanity’s only hope in the face of an otherworldly apocalypse. Just your typical night out, really. WIRED asked the trio about bromance, revelry, and the ice cream treat that brought it all together.

Read more